Rose: Sex-Selective Abortion Is True War on Women

Since the sex-selective abortion scandal broke with a string of undercover videos exposing this brutal practice at abortion clinics across the country, Planned Parenthood has stumbled to come up with a coherent response. The leading abortion provider is in retreat, offering contradictory and confused answers to the media about where it stands on a defining issue for women.

In an undercover video filmed in New York City at Planned Parenthood’s headquarters, a social worker instructs a woman which tests to use to determine the gender of her unborn child and pre-emptively schedules an abortion if the baby is a girl.

“As a woman’s health advocate for nearly 100 years, Planned Parenthood opposes sex selection abortion,” the nation’s biggest abortion business claimed afterward in response, but in the same statement, it defended its employee’s actions as “nonjudgmental, informative services that are in accordance with social work standards for patient interaction.”

President and CEO Cecile Richards skipped the pretense of opposing sex-selective abortion entirely last month when she explained Planned Parenthood’s opposition to the Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act (PRENDA), a federal sex-selective abortion ban, because it would “limit [a woman’s] choices as she makes personal medical decisions.”

The only limit PRENDA would create is a ban on sex-selection, as well as penalizing those that may coerce women into having sex-selective abortions — but the abortion giant CEO couldn’t stomach even that.

Planned Parenthood’s actions in support of sex-selective abortion will always betray their mere words against it because at the heart of Planned Parenthood and the entire abortion industry is a dogmatic commitment to abortion above all: Any abortion is a good abortion, at any time and for any reason. When Planned Parenthood’s abortion-first mentality is deployed in the barbaric search-and-destroy mission against baby girls, all its caterwauling about a “war on women” becomes nothing more than a shallow, self-serving lie.

Sex-selective abortion is growing in the United States at an alarming rate. While we cherish the principle of equal protection, six studies in just the past four years present chilling and compelling evidence that this lethal form of gender discrimination has taken root in our country. Recent polling shows nearly 80 percent of Americans — and 80 percent of American women — want a ban on sex-selective abortion, but few know that it’s happening in their own backyard.

New, widely available technology to determine an unborn child’s gender as early as the first trimester will make abortion for sex-selection as convenient as abortion for any other reason. Anyone can now purchase an over-the-counter drugstore test to find out early if they are pregnant with the “right” gender — and if not, as Live Action’s undercover videos show, Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry are open for business.

This is why now is the time for PRENDA, which won nearly 60 percent support in the House — including 20 Democrats — two weeks ago, failing to pass only because it was considered under a procedure that required a two-thirds vote.

This speaks volumes about sex-selective abortion as a bipartisan issue and a practice that lawmakers keep legal at their electoral peril.

In the United States, we cherish the principle of equal protection under the law. Yet legal abortion-on-demand has left our unborn daughters exposed to the lethal discrimination of sex-selective abortion. This is the true “war on women,” and this war must end.